This is certainly a lot of fun, and a brilliant promotional tool for Xing! I suppose it’s good to know that my network has some monetary value, and that value (a cool £1.6m – Phil, what am I doing wrong?!!) is above average for someone at my career point and in my line of work. But just how useful is it, and what does it all mean? Similar questions are being posed about http://twifficiency.com. Xing doesn’t know who my contacts are and which ones drive my business, let alone the value of that business, so the figure is pretty meaningless other than to provide ‘bragging metrics’ that social media thrives on.

Hi Graham – thanks for taking the time to do the test and comment. I assume that my value is down to the diversity of the network – I suspect yours is focussed on your specialist sector (but it could just be a random number for all I know!). The service seems to be an old Xing feature – I found it in a blog post from 2007 (thanks to Om Malik). As you say – it’s fun! I’ve had a few people come back via email (not as brave as you sharing their value via comments) – Mega Networker ($1.7m), Super IT/Marketer (£250k) and Best Connected Man in Local Education (£983). The record claim I can find on-line is £4,176,444 from David Petherick of http://buy-me-a-pint.com. Go figure ….

Hi Phil,
I’m with Graham – I’m not sure how valid this analysis is in and of itself, and it assumes that we define success in terms of a big number.

It’s interesting that everyone seems to get a result that tells us that we are above average for our group. It reminds me of the Strong-Campbell Interest tests we did for career ed in Uni – everybody seemed to get Military Service as an option high on their list of career matches. Maybe it was just the science nerd crew I was hanging out with ;D.

Thanks for giving it a try. I think we are all agreed it more a “bit of fun” than a valid analysis. The service has been on-line since at least 2007 … and it doesn’t look as if they’ve really collected that much data over the time. I think that my value was high because I put my market sector as “Media – Print” (Graham’s would be “Media – Broadcast”). I suspect that they’ve not updated their view of market sectors in the last few years (surely Media – Print must have very low value these days?)!!

I’d not looked at the “above average” that way – I just assumed all my contacts were naturally above average!! That’s a great tale about the Military Service option… I like a healthy cynicism about this sort of stuff.